Trump Threatens to Rename Lake Ontario as Spat With Canada Escalates

WASHINGTON—President Trump threatened to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” in the latest escalation of tensions between the U.S. and Canada after trade negotiations between the two countries collapsed.

On Tuesday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the U.S. is “giving serious consideration” to the name change because it didn’t expect to be “doing much business with Ontario any longer.”

Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes, spans the U.S.-Canada border. The northern portion of the lake is in Ontario and the southern portion is in New York. Canada likely wouldn’t recognize a unilateral name change by the U.S.

Last year, Trump signed an executive order declaring that the Gulf of Mexico—which is bounded by the U.S., Mexico and Cuba—would be renamed the “Gulf of America.” The name change, which applied to federal publications and communications, generally isn’t recognized by other countries, including Mexico.

Trump said Monday that the U.S. would impose 50% tariffs on automobiles and parts from Canada starting in January, as relations between the two countries worsened amid a trade tit-for-tat.

After trade talks broke down over the weekend, Trump said the U.S. would implement separate 50% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of Canadian goods. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said his country would respond.

U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, said on Monday that the two sides could return to the negotiating table. But Carney said Canada would only restart talks when Americans show up “with the right attitude.”

“An attitude at the negotiating table that Canada is going to be a subsidiary of the United States… that’s not something we’re going to accept,” the prime minister said.

Carney has listed several alleged last-minute demands that he said his country wouldn’t agree to, including weakening Canadian protections for the French language and culture.

Trump said Tuesday he would “never interfere with Canadians speaking French” and accused Carney of lying “in an attempt to gain political support, which he has totally lost, from the people of Quebec.”

Federal and provincial laws to protect the French language have long drawn criticism from the U.S., including requirements that product labels must be written in English and French, Canada’s two official languages. Carney said U.S. officials also took aim at a law that required streaming platforms such as Netflix to promote French-language programming and make it easier for users to find.

Despite his insistence that the U.S. doesn’t need Canada, Trump acknowledged this week that the U.S. sometimes relies on its northern neighbor. During a tele-rally Monday for Oklahoma gubernatorial candidate Mike Mazzei, Trump reiterated support for a proposed $4 billion aluminum plant in the state and said “selfishly, we need aluminum in this country, we don’t have it, we get it all from Canada for the most part.”

Trump and Mazzei have thrown their support behind a proposed aluminum smelter outside of Tulsa, Okla., that would be the first such facility built in the U.S. since the 1970s. Mazzei’s opponent, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, has filed suit to stop the plant, putting the project at risk if Drummond wins the Republican nomination for governor on Tuesday.

Trump has reserved his sharpest criticism for Doug Ford, the outspoken premier of Ontario. On Monday, the U.S. president wrote on social media that Ford was “better known as the less charismatic, intelligent, and overall unimpressive brother of the late, great, Rob Ford.” Rob Ford was a controversial former mayor of Toronto, who died in 2016 after a cancer diagnosis.

When asked about Trump’s post, the Ontario premier told reporters, “I don’t respond to a dictator like President Trump.”

Since returning to the White House, Trump has imposed tariffs on Canadian goods, repeatedly questioned Canada’s independence as a country and threatened to make it the 51st state. Trump said over the weekend that Canada “wants the benefits of being a State, without being one.”

Trump criticized Canada last month for its handling of the wildfires, writing on social media that the U.S. was being “unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air” and describing it as “willful negligence.”